Talosian Chronicles 1: Olympus (23 page)

“I hired him shortly after that, and he’s been with me ever since. I made sure that he wasn’t beating up on Lara and Tara, and for the most part he controlled it. You know the rest; I came to you when he started showing up to work still drunk,” Elias finished.

Ian shook his head in disbelief. “I will never understand how anyone can put greed before their family. Luke’s a great person; he didn’t deserve what his father did to him.”

“No one deserves that from their father. I think we’re doing what we can for him though. Most people would have just let him sink,” Elias said.

“Well, he’ll be better in a few days, and should be impatient to get back to work...” Ian said as his phone rang, he answered it. “Hello?”

“Pardon me, Sir, but this is Tommy down at the gate. I have a Ms. Pritchard out here, and she’s demanding entry.”

“I’ve never heard of her. Tell her to leave before we have her arrested for trespassing. If she wants a meeting, she can make an appointment. Sorry to dump this on you Tommy, if you need any help, let us know.”

“Will do, Sir,” Tommy said and hung up.

“What was that about?” Elias asked.

“Somebody named Pritchard demanding to be allowed in. She sure as hell doesn’t have an appointment, and she sounds like she’s a bitch anyway,” Ian replied.

Elias chuckled. “Abigail Pritchard. She’s one of the local radicals that believes the government will grant anyone the right to anything they want out here in the desert. She feels it’s her responsibility to blow the whistle on any company careless enough to allow her on the property. If you dig a hole to take a dump, she will want to see the permits and environmental impact statements that allow you to do it. Then bitch that you wiped with bleached paper.”

“Wonderful, do you think she’ll try to bypass the guard shack to get on the property?” Ian asked.

“Definitely. She’ll just wait a few days because she thinks that’s being sneaky.” Elias replied.

Ian made a note on his pad to look into some form of security for the community. Seeing the note, Elias smiled. “You know Ian, I’ve been thinking; you’re going to need marines along with more pilots to crew the ship.

“I remember Janet Laskar once telling me that they’d recruited a man from the Navy. I have no idea what they’re called, but he used to be the one responsible for landing and launching aircraft on a carrier. If I remember correctly, he’s now the flight operations chief down below. He might know some good candidates for the security detail, as well as pilots.”

“That’s a damn good idea, Elias. I didn’t even think of that. I’ll give him a call.” Ian made another note. “Now, let’s take a look at these building plans.”

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“I
an? Do you have a minute?” Carla Nelson asked as she stuck her head in the door.

“Sure Carla, what’s up?”

“I just thought you might like to know that our application to form a municipality has been approved. We are now officially a town.” She said grinning.

“Really? That’s fabulous! When did this happen?” Ian asked.

“Well, when I was filing all the stuff we’d need to do what we wanted out here, applying for this was the answer to a few of the problems that came up, so we filed for it. It was kinda of a spur of the moment thing, so we didn’t have time to call a meeting. May I be the first to welcome you to Talos, New Mexico.”

“That’s a fitting name. What’s next?”

Carla grinned. “We need to hold elections for the office of Mayor, Treasurer and all that. We have ninety days to hold the elections and submit a town board. I have a good idea who’s going to get the Mayor’s job.”

“As long as it’s not me, I’ll be happy. I have enough to worry about, and with luck, I’ll be moving up to the ship soon,” Ian said.

“Spoil sport!” Carla laughed as she pulled her head from his office.

A discrete chirp told Ian there was an incoming message. He touched a key on his terminal and the message was displayed;

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I
an grinned, those should actually be fun to fly. He needed to find a Major John Harris anyway, so he decided to go down and see the new system himself. Briefly he wondered how come he hadn’t already met the man, since he was supposed to be a senior staff member.

When Ian arrived at Flight Operations, it was a hive of activity. People were scurrying about like there was an emergency, and red lights were flashing. Ian moved over next to a wall to stay out of the way and watch.

The Flight Operations control center was in the midst of a simulated drill. From what little Ian knew of this area, the people seemed to be doing well.

“Okay folks! That’s enough. That’s better; we’re improving. Flanning, that was a very good response time on getting the damage control teams moving, however, If we could have kept the bird from stacking out in the first place we wouldn’t have needed them. How come that bird crashed? Anyone?” A large African-American man in the center of the room asked.

No one seemed to come up with an answer for him, and people were looking around at the others hoping to find it. One of the young people saw Ian standing by the door. “Attention on Deck!” She said as she came to attention. Everyone in the room snapped to attention and Ian grinned. “As you were. Please continue, Chief.”

“Thank you, Sir.” He said as he turned back to his team. “Folks, this isn’t an ocean going flat-top we are training on. This simulation is for an advanced space carrier. It’s equipped with tractor beams... Now, why did that bird crash?”

One young ensign seemed to catch on. “Sir, because the automatic crash systems didn’t come online!”

“Correct, they didn’t come online because a power hit to the ship caused the system to short, forcing it into stand-by mode,” Major Harris explained.

“The ship crashed because I didn’t do a system check at the beginning of my shift,” a third ensign said sadly.

“Exactly. Folks, I don’t say this to hurt your feelings or scare you; but those pilots’ lives are in our hands whenever they launch or land. Any mistakes on our part will most likely cost one of those people their life.

“I don’t care how far behind you’re running, or how late you are. I will chew you out for reporting late, but I will never chew you out for delaying a launch or recovery while you check your systems,” Harris said, making eye contact with most of those present. “If it’s an emergency situation, the person leaving the station will stay until it’s safe to be relieved. You can assist them, but mostly try to just stay out of the way until the switch can be made. Understand?”

“Yes Sir!” They all said in unison.

“Good, take five and we’ll do it all again. Dismissed.” The big man turned to Ian and saluted. “Good to meet you, Sir. John Harris; Flight Operations.”

“Relax Major, this is a hell of a team you’re training up here,” Ian said.

“We’re all new to this, Sir. There’s a lot of adjustment needed.”

“Major, I’m curious, as Flight Operations Chief, you should be attending meetings with the rest of my senior officers. Why haven’t you?” Ian asked.

“I haven’t officially taken the position, Sir. I’m not ready yet. From what I understand, I don’t have the correct DNA or some such to use the teaching gizmos, so I’m doing this the old fashioned way,” Harris said.

“Wow, and you’re already this good? I’m impressed. You’re already training kids for flight operations aboard ship,” Ian said.

“I’ve found that the best way to learn is to teach. The little incident you just witnessed is a good example. I should have caught the red light on that system, but I missed it too. I spend my evenings reading all the regs and procedures, but during the day, we are in here trying to put what we’ve learned into a simulated situation. I think we’re all learning pretty fast,” the big man said. “We’re not ready for prime-time yet, but we’re getting there.”

Ian nodded in approval. “Are you getting someone trained to take over down here?”

“Yes sir. Major Alder will have the run of the place once we go up to the ship. We’ve split the time each of us work in here. He’ll be taking over after lunch. Right now, his team’s a lot better than we are; mostly because of my slow learning curve. But we should be ready soon.”

“Excellent! Could you come up to my office when you’re finished here? I have a few questions for you. Right now, I want to get over to the training area and get a look at those new simulators,” Ian said.

John grinned. “I think you’ll like them, Sir. I’m not a pilot, but looking at those almost makes me want to learn how to fly.”

Ian returned the grin. “Great! Let’s just hope the kids upstairs agree with you! See you after lunch.”

Ian left as John’s team started coming back in.

He walked over to the training area and found Ensign Saunders tinkering with one of the new simulators.

“How’s it going, Ensign?” Ian said, startling the young man.

“Jesus Chis... Sir! I’m sorry; I didn’t see you come in!” He said as he hastily got to his feet, came to attention and saluted.

“At ease, Ensign. I got your message about the simulators and wanted to see them for myself. How soon do you think you can get them installed top-side?” Ian asked.

“If we got them up there now, I could probably have them set up by tomorrow morning. The system is really neat; we can stuff the whole thing into a double-wide trailer and all we need to do is plug it in, everything else is integrated into the system,” the young Ensign said excitedly.

“Wow, that’s better than we hoped for. You have my approval to proceed; let me know when you get them set-up; I’d like to take it out for a spin,” Ian said grinning.

“It would help to have a pilot do the final test on it after I get the unit assembly complete. Would you like to do that, Sir?” Saunders asked.

“I’d be honored, Ensign. Just give me a call when you get it ready, and I’ll make time for you. Good work.”

Ian returned to his office in a good mood. Things seemed to be going well, and soon he and his family would be able to move aboard ship.

When he got back, he found Elias and Janet Laskar waiting for him. “What can I do for you two today?”

“I thought I would let you know that the computers for the new education system have been ordered, and should be getting here within the month. The rest of the network has already been set up, and I briefed our teachers on how it’ll work. They’re almost as excited as the kids are,” Janet reported.

“Great, but I thought Laura was taking care of that?” Ian asked.

“She is, but I’ve been helping her in my spare time. Elias wanted to ask you about something and asked if I could come along, so Laura just asked me to let you know how things were proceeding,” Janet said, looking pointedly at Elias.

“My guys tell me we’re ready to start laying the water and sewer mains then pave the streets. If you’ll remember, I said we aren’t equipped to do that?” Elias said. “I know of a couple of really good companies that might take the contract; we’ve worked with them before. In my opinion, they might be good additions to the community as well.”

“Why don’t you give them a call and you and Janet can interview them. I’ll want Janet’s folks to interview all their employees as well. It would be really easy for the government or anyone else to slip a spy in here,” Ian said.

Elias nodded and Janet smiled ruefully. “I think I’m going to need more people, Ian. As it stands now, there are only five of us, and three of them are out recruiting people. If I’m going to need to do that many interviews, I’ll need more people myself.”

“Just how many people are we talking about here Elias?” Ian asked.

“A couple hundred if they bring their whole crew. I don’t know that much about civil engineering, but what I do know tells me they’ll probably want as many of their folks as possible,” Elias answered. “If they stay, we’ll be almost doubling our population on the surface.”

“While I agree that recruiting them would be a great idea, once the job we’re hiring them for is done, we’ll have to retrain most of them for more useful jobs. That’ll require letting them in on more of the secret than we have for our existing people,” Ian said.

“Well, I think the time is rapidly approaching when we’re going to have to tell all of them. We already have a lot of bored housewives. If we could give them an alternative, I think morale would go through the roof,” Elias said.

“Let me walk through and get a general feeling about how that news might affect them. If we just dump the truth on them, we’ll probably lose most of them,” Janet said. “Perhaps we can go about it a different way. Ian, I’ll need you to make a video presentation with our people in mind as the intended audience. Start at the beginning, and tell them everything. I’ll get them ready to accept the information in a positive way. When the time comes, we can play the recording, and that’ll be that.”

“Well, I don’t think we should tell them about the mental abilities some of the folks have. People tend to really freak out about that kind of thing. At least we only have a very few people that actually have them,” Ian said.

“We have more than you might think. Olympus has told me that the occurrence of abilities is far above what was normal for the Talosian people of four thousand years ago,” Janet said. “The curious part is a lot of those that have them don’t seem to even be aware of them. Like yours for example.”

“Huh? I don’t have any abilities. I’m just a normal eighteen-year-old,” Ian said.

Both Elias and Janet laughed. “You are far from a ‘normal’ anything, Ian. I don’t think there’s an eighteen-year-old on this planet that can handle the responsibility that you do. I sure-as-hell know I wouldn’t trust any of them to the degree I trust you!” Elias said.

“You do have an ability, Ian. You just don’t use it all that often, and when you do, you don’t notice that you’re doing it,” Janet said. “I want you to order me to undress; which is something I would never do in front of either of you. I want you to think about the command, and concentrate on it as you say it. Please, just remember to stop me before I actually do it. I will be doing my best not to do what you tell me.”